Archive for September, 2009

We here at Haikasoru HQ get very excited when the first boxes of a new book come in. We were so excited, in fact, about the new edition of Battle Royale (in stores in November) that we spent all afternoon playing with them.

Cool fort we built, eh? We were hiding from our boss, who came to work with a crossbow today!

But in the workplace, as in a battle royale itself, you can trust no one. Eric quickly turned on me to win the game! (Rats!)

I’m just kidding, you all. We don’t really build forts out of new books when they come in to the office for the first time. We made the intern build the fort for us.

Anyway, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for both former friends turned bloodthirsty psychotics AND the new edition of a Battle Royale, coming soon!

Suddenly Mercury is a very popular planet. First came the release of Usurper of the Sun, a novel about the innermost planet in our Solar System. And now we have a basketball squad called the Mercury vying for the WNBA championship. Holy Hermes! A quick glance at the roster confirms that no one on the team is named Alice. Whew!

Just a quick note tonight, that I was interviewed about our rockin’ and seasonally appropriate dark fantasy title ZOO over at Ranobe Café (coffee not included). Mostly it’s me ranting about how poorly short stories are treated in the US marketplace.

In the interview, I mention that Stephen King, who knows a little something about horror and about short stories, recently declared that people have forgotten how to read short fiction. Here is the piece, btw, provided by Simon & Schuster which is, not-so-coincidentally, the distributor of fine Haikasoru products and the occasional provider of doughnuts to me when I am in New York for sales conferences. Check it out! (Btw, he says a “bad word” so if you’re at work, put on headphones.)

Back when he was coming up, King would publish his short stories in men’s magazines and fantasy rags. Now that he is the most popular writer in the world, he can publish in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Esquire, and he is one of the few authors whose short story collections can appear in mass market paperback after a hardcover release. For the rest of us, including Otsuichi, who is very popular in Japan (740,000+ copies of ZOO alone over there!) the short story collection is a risk. Is King right? Have we fallen out of love with the short story? Are we too LAZY to invest in a story and then eighteen pages later reset our brains and try again? I worry that he is right. After all, the men’s magazines and fantasy rags that once published King are now either defunct, devoid of fiction entirely, or have one-fifth the readers they once had.

Prove me—and the KING—wrong, kids! Buy ZOO and I’ll be able to publish more short fiction from Japan.